Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#1

Post by norasppi » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:30 PM UTC

The Raspberry Pi forum is currently down on the day they start selling it- uh, I mean allowing you to again express interest in it, via a vendor this time, because they had to switch to a static site, and forgot to make the forum available: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forum

If you've spent much time on the forum, you've seen that it isn't all it is cracked up to be. You are spending £21.60 on caseless slow computer using ARM that has not been tested adequately in beta and that has to be hooked up via HDMI to be much good. So basically, it is a crappy, overly slow, wrong architecture, barebones media streaming computer. If you want to spend that much money, spend a little more and get a full system that is faster and more useful.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#2

Post by dragonbonheur » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

It would make one hell of a video game system. It would be great for developing countries. It would be great to learn embedded software or operating system design. It would be great to learn compiler or interpreter design. It could drive netbook prices down. Anyone could make his own tablet thanks to it being caseless. Anyone could build massively parallel clusters by connecting a bunch of them through ethernet. By hooking up a micro projector, a usb camera and a microphone one could easily have a SixthSense capable device. In short: I want one.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#3

Post by pavlov » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:42 PM UTC

... has to be hooked up via HDMI to be much good.

As if that's a downside in a computer that costs less than 30 euros?

Price comparison: if I spend 30 € at an Apple retailer, I get a DisplayPort->HDMI adapter. It doesn't include an ARM-based computer at all.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#4

Post by mrkmcknz » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:46 PM UTC

I agree, in the UK all I'm hearing is this will help kids program.

I'm sorry but any computer and Codecademy will do that.

It's a poor piece of hardware that is using its price point as the trump card. However, I don't think expensive hardware is the problem.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#5

Post by ja27 » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:48 PM UTC

It's not an end-user device yet. A lot of people are jumping on this as a cheap media center PC and they'll be disappointed. But there are plenty of us that want to stick a battery pack on it and put it in a robot or something more fun.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#6

Post by Rhapso » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:51 PM UTC

I think they will be a little horrified, but everybody I talk to in my peer group, and myself want one for embedded development.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#7

Post by to3m » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:51 PM UTC

"If you want to spend that much money"?

£21.60 is not a great deal of money - but even if it was, it still won't buy you much ;)

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#8

Post by seclorum » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:51 PM UTC

I agree that this thing is underpowered - a Beagleboard would be a better investment, since its at least beefy enough to support having its own development environment onboard. I run mine as a normal Linux workstation, no cross-compiling required, gcc+cscope+vim+gdb is onboard of course, and its been a productive environment for years ..

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#9

Post by jgrahamc » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:52 PM UTC

I disagree and will happily be buying one for the low price. As a hobbyist I don't have any problem with the 'limitations' that you point out. The low price point makes it interesting and the combination of networking, video and GPIO makes it look like flexible device. Equally the case is not a problem (in fact, it's an advantage since I'll be burying my Raspberry Pis inside other things).

I'm not sure what's wrong with HDMI: my MacBook Pro connects to my monitor with HDMI as that's what the monitor supports. ARM architecture seems fine on every phone out there (and elsewhere) and as I'll likely be programming small programs in C for the device I don't think the architecture is going to get in my way.

As for speed considerations I've done a lot of things with Arduino and they are _slow_ compared to Raspberry Pi.

Re: Tell HN: Don't waste your money on a Raspberry Pi

#10

Post by msh » Wed, Feb 29, 2012, 1:55 PM UTC

seclorum wrote: post #8

I agree that this thing is underpowered - a Beagleboard would be a better investment, since its at least beefy enough to support having its own development environment onboard. I run mine as a normal Linux workstation, no cross-compiling required, gcc+cscope+vim+gdb is onboard of course, and its been a productive environment for years ..

could you please expand on this?

I find the idea interesting, how normal is it as a workstation? Can you run X with a windowmanager and a graphical browser at a decent speed?